In the airline industry, tickets for airline flights of one airline may be sold through the reservation and ticketing system of another airline. The ticketing airline collects the airfare from the passenger and this airfare is transferred to the carrier airline only after the ticket has been redeemed. The carrier airline is obviously interested in collecting this airfare as soon after the flight as possible.
In prior art systems, sales information (data relating to what fare has been collected for each ticket number, etc.) is gathered by each airline from various ticketing entities. Tickets collected from passengers at the time of boarding are sent to a sorting center and these tickets are run through a high speed optical character recognition (OCR) scanning device. More than 100,000 tickets are typically scanned each day at the sorting center. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical airline ticket, indicated generally at 10. Each ticket 10 includes a unique ticket number 12 near the ticket's lower edge. As illustrated in FIG. 2, the OCR scanner 20 optically reads and captures the ticket number 12 from each ticket 10 and stores this information in a local computer 22 coupled to the OCR scanner 20 via dedicated local link 23.
After a quantity of tickets 10 have been scanned, they are temporarily stored and the data in the OCR scanner's local computer 22 is transmitted to the remotely located mainframe computer 24 which contains the sales database. This transmission occurs over normal subscriber long-distance telephone lines, over a dedicated telephone line, or by magnetic tape (hand carried) as indicated by the dashed line 25. This transmission typically occurs overnight. The sales database in the mainframe computer 24 is compiled from information provided to the mainframe computer 24 from ticket issuers 26 via telephone line 27. The mainframe computer 24 then matches each ticket number 12 with the sales information in the sales database in order to determine the revenue value for each ticket. This matching is required so that the carrier airline can transfer unearned revenue to earned revenue (unearned revenue is from sale of the ticket, earned revenue is from usage of the ticket). A new computer data file is created which contains the ticket number 12 for which the mainframe computer has sales data. Ticket numbers 12 which do not match the ticket number data in the sales database are recorded in another new data file. The non-matching ticket numbers 12 usually result from late sales reporting (sales data can be received two weeks to two months after the first ticket usage).
Therefore, the data file containing the unmatched ticket numbers 12 is transmitted back to the local computer 22 at the OCR scanner 20 site via line 25. The original tickets 10 are then removed from temporary storage and rescanned, so that the OCR scanner 22 can separate them into different stacks 28 depending upon whether a match was made between the ticket number 12 and the sales database information. As the OCR scanner 20 reads the ticket number 12 for the second time, the local computer 22 accesses the new data file (matched and unmatched numbers), and if the currently scanned ticket number 12 is one of the ticket numbers which did not match, that ticket 10 is segregated into a separate stack 28. These non-matching tickets 10 may then be manually keyed into the local computer 22 by a human operator. This manually keyed sales data is then transmitted over line 25 to mainframe computer 24 to recognize revenue as earned revenue.
It is obviously undesirable to have to scan each ticket twice, but this is required because prior art computing methods and hardware cannot match the scanned ticket number 12 to the sales database fast enough to keep up with the desired scanning speeds (typically 1000 tickets 10 per minute). If the scanning device 20 and associated local computer 22 were able to match the ticket number 12 to its sales data during the scanning process (i.e. in real time), the second scanning operation could be entirely eliminated. This would result in at least a 50% efficiency improvement.